Darkness, My Only Light
by nolandsman
Summary: Seated on a lonesome throne of a recovering kingdom, a friendless queen composes a letter of devotion to a lost companion. Post Ocarina of Time, unrequited Zelimpa.


The first time I met you, kneeling before my father in deference, you were barely older than I am now. But to a small girl, hiding behind her handmaid's skirt, you seemed eternal, like a ghost or a god. I remember your hair was short then, spiked up like so many white flames, mirroring the sharp tattoos that colored your dark cheekbones. I had never seen a woman like you before, and later, much later, I learned I would never see one again. You were the last, the only, of your kind.

I was afraid of you, at first, likely because I was confused. I did not know where my mother had gone, or why I was suddenly told to don a dark veil and march down the boulevard by my father's side. I did not know why the town gathered at the ends of the road and offered their flowers and silks in consolation, throwing scraps of black cloth in the wake of our procession.

That was the last time I saw my mother. I was not sure exactly why she would not rise from her bed-like palanquin, but I knew she was not sleeping. It is the clearest memory I have of her—her mournful trip down the streets of Castletown, her pale face under the harsh sun, the way the litter bearers carried her so considerately to her tomb. She had been dressed for burial in her finest ivory and silk, clutching her ornate rapier at her breast, golden hair laced with a halo of white flowers. She never looked so beautiful as she had at her funeral.

We lined up to pay our respects. First came my father, then me, then the ministers and generals and lords and ladies, then the handmaids and servants, then the soldiers. When it came your turn to bow your head to her lovely corpse, I saw the look of familiarity you gave her. I saw the look of affliction on your face, and for a moment I wondered if you had known her, as an ally, an employer, or an acquaintance. But I realized that the recognition in your eyes was not for her person, but for the state into which she had passed. You knew death like an old friend.

I was to later learn that you had seen death many times, that you were used to its presence. On the front lines from which you barely returned, it was an omnipresent threat, following soldiers from ditch to ditch, haunting their every shallow breath. But death did not frighten you. You had been born into a tradition of shadow, a world of darkness—you were everything my parents, my caretakers, my culture, told me to fear. But it wasn't long after I met you, when I knew you were tasked with staying at my side, that I stopped fearing you and started loving you.

You helped me find white tulips to give to my mother. You led me to her tomb when the other nurses would not, out the castle walls and into the royal graveyard. You sat with me at the foot of the marble structure, helping me arrange the flowers under her embossed name, and told me there was really no such thing as death. You told me there was no such thing as termination, only transformation. All the complex and ineffable pieces that comprise a person come from nothing but the earth, and the earth takes back what it lends—no more, no less.

There was nothing to fear from change, especially a change as natural and inevitable as death. "It's much like being born, but backwards," you told me, with a kind smile. "Did you fear your own birth?"

"No," I admitted. I hadn't remembered it. Who does?

"Well then, little princess, you've nothing to fear from death, either."

You took me other places, besides her grave, that the other nurses wouldn't dare. My favorite spot was the roof of the eastern tower, where you would take me in the early morning, to watch the progression of sunlight across the darkened kingdom. You would wake me with a hand to my forehead, softly stroking, coaxing my eyes open, far before any of the other servants would rise. You'd have me out and back again before even the most vigilant nurse would come to check on me, and I was proud to share this secret with you. I was so sure, for so long, that no one else saw the sunrise you showed me, the way it soared over the dip in the peak of Death Mountain like a slow, fiery shot from the mouth of a colossal cannon. You would often say that on the slopes of that great peak was your home, but you hadn't been back there since the war ended.

I never did like it when you talked about the war—though it was long over, when you spoke of it, even in passing, your eyes would lower, your voice would soften and your jaw would clench, almost imperceptibly. But I saw it. And so I always tried to change the subject. After all, it was all over, right? You were no longer a soldier. You belonged to me, and I to you, and I promised myself I wouldn't let you fight ever again. I must've been seven or eight when I made that vow. I was a foolish, wishful child, devoid of wisdom but full of the temerity to make promises I could not keep.

* * *

With my mother buried beyond the palace walls, and my father atop his throne, juggling the provinces and myriad ambassadors from the desert, you stood in for both of them. When I did not see my father for weeks at a time, you would sing me to sleep. When I woke from my dreams sweating and screaming every night, you were at my side, assuring me I was safe. When the king brushed off my words of worry like dust from his red cloak, you took me in your strong arms and told me you believed me; you said you understood the difference between nightmares and prophecies. You were the only one who did.

Everyone thought me an overwrought fool; my father, my other caretakers, even, for a time, myself. But you believed me, and I could never think you a fool, so I had to believe in myself. If it weren't for this ill-advised faith in what was nothing more than a series of terrible dreams, we would never have been able to salvage this kingdom.

You were my savior, in the end. You were my father, my mother, my sister, my only friend. You were everything, and then you were gone.

* * *

There was one other person besides you I counted as a friend. I only saw him twice in childhood, and while most would not deem that as friendship, a girl of my station spends much of her day preoccupied with her own loneliness—ever-obeyed but never liked, always alone but never allowed privacy (naturally, as a self-absorbed child, I never thought about how lonely you must've been. I lost my mother, you lost everyone you'd ever known. I might be the last of a bloodline, but you were the last of an entire culture).

When that golden-haired boy snuck his way into the inner garden, all bright hope and well-meaning energy, I knew at once you'd let him in. I thanked you silently when I saw he was my own age, and thought you had picked him out as a companion for me. When he showed as much surprise at my presence as I'd shown at his, I knew his sudden appearance meant something else—something much grander and far more significant than my personal loneliness.

I knew then that you'd not escorted him to the garden, but you'd let him slip past your keen eye, waiting for him to find his way to me. You'd let him in because you believed me about my nightmares, you believed me when I told you I saw one ray of hope pierce the clouds. You could've snapped that boy like a twig—of course, according to your station, you _should_ _'_ _ve_ —but you didn't. You let him come to me and listen, because, I think, you knew he was our only recourse. We had no allies in Castletown, so we had to accept this strange outsider into our fold of prophetic dreams and wild wishes. If you had obeyed the king's direct orders to keep me isolated, and not my unsupported, fantastical prognostications, that boy would've spent the night in a cell and we should be in a very, very different Hyrule.

But then again, if you'd thrown him in prison, you might still be here, with me. We might both be dead, or worse (for there are many worse things), but we'd at least be together.

* * *

One of my most cherished memories is of dancing lessons. I hated them. I was miserable when relegated to a rigid-backed, thick-gowned doll, dangling off the arms of a hired instructor.

You told me the essence of dance, like the essence of combat, was footwork. That I could predict the moves of an opponent the same way I could anticipate the steps of a dancing partner. You made the dreaded activity useful to me, so much so I no longer saw the point, unless I danced with you. My father upbraided me endlessly, for choosing to waltz with my own caretaker when there were dozens of noble boys, all lined up at the wall, waiting for a turn. All the royal balls degenerated into farces with me there, sidestepping around you like we did when you taught me how to anticipate a strike, or throw a man over my shoulder with no effort. It was an egregious mistake on my father's part to ban you from those fetes, since I would refuse to attend if you were not there, and if forced I would decline all partners, preferring to lounge alone in a chair with a sour look on my face.

The dances you taught me were the only ones that meant anything to me—the fluid, relaxed movements stayed with me well after the music ended. The circular steps you taught I would later use to dodge a blow. The quick, eccentric flicks of hands and feet served me well when striking or throwing a knife. You taught me to dance to the rhythm of your harp, to respond to the trills of your sharp whistle with my ocarina. All these skills, on the surface seemingly mere distractions for a wealthy noble girl, carried a formidable mysticism that made them stick to the inside of my head like insects in a web. You made me remember things the other nurses let me forget. And it's because of that I lived where the others died.

* * *

The last month of the last year of my father's reign (though neither of us knew it at the time), you took me to the village of Kakariko. It was at my adamant insistence, of course, since at first you did not appear keen on the idea. In my ignorance, I could not fathom why.

You had told me it was your hometown, though when you were born there, it had a different name. I was excited to meet your family, I was excited to see the friends you'd grown up with, to explore the paths you'd once explored as a girl my age. I expected to see more people like you.

The villagers were necessarily accommodating. You refused to force me to ride in a palanquin like my mothers before me, hidden from the world, much to the scandal and delight of both Kakariko and Castletown. Instead you kept me close in your lap, on the back of your swift white horse, like a peasant woman might ride with her child. When the citizens of Kakariko leaned and whispered to one another, smiling behind their cupped hands, I was proud. I was proud to have raised their eyebrows, to look into their faces and smile back when they bowed their heads. It was the first time I'd caught a true glimpse of the people I was fated to one day rule.

It struck me as odd that they all looked like me, and not you. My handmaidens had told me you were well known from your exploits during the civil war, and for opening Kakariko's gates to the masses. In a way, they told me, you were the village's founder. But you seemed ill at ease among the citizens; your smile did not come as easily when we were within the town's sturdy walls.

A house was prepared for us to spend the night, well-lit and surrounded by royal guards. One soldier told me it was your house, although it was built for you well after the war ended, well after you'd taken up residence in the palace. I knew better than to think this square, squat building, so like the ones in Castletown, was the abode of your youth. It was too new, too unlike you.

I asked you which house was the one you'd grown up in. You stared out the window, and it started to rain. The windmill turned lazily against the setting sun.

"They burned it down," you answered.

I asked you where your family was, and where your friends had gone. I will never forget the moment when you turned from the window and looked at me as if I had reached for your heart myself and twisted it from your chest. But the brief change in your countenance passed almost instantly, and your face again fell into its calm, noble self.

You asked me if I wanted to learn how to slip creep around unnoticed, like a true Sheikah. I answered with an emphatic yes. So you held my hand and led me, cloaking us in shadows and magic, past the men that stood at our door, past the soldiers stationed at the end of the street, watching for trouble. You wore the darkness like a shield against their sight, against their suspicion. You crept through the mud without leaving a print, you slinked through the rainy village without slipping. You led me to the other end of Kakariko, past the windmill and the well. Just as the last sliver of light disappeared behind us, we arrived in the torchlit graveyard.

I remember being struck dumb at how different it was from my family's burial grounds. Dozens—hundreds—of graves, some marked, others not, were squeezed into the small plot of land, crumbling and moss-eaten. At the far end of the yard was a large monument carved with the crest of my family. I had learned that in ancient times, kings and queens were buried here rather than on the palace grounds. My father told me the tomb had filled over the centuries, piled so high with the corpses of my ancestors, there was no room in there for my mother. He'd also said something about curses and the undead, but I thought it was an excuse at the time, to keep his wife's headstone close to his own castle.

I did not know why a village so young should need such a crowded graveyard. I took your hand, slick in the rain, and asked you if there had been a plague.

"Of sorts."

I did not fully understand what you told me next, at least, not at the time. You admitted to me that you only opened the village's gates to common Hylian folk because there was no one left to live in it. The last warriors of your people had been called to aid the Hyrulean king in the war, and those left behind had fallen to invaders' swords. You were the last one.

When the war ended, you returned here to find nothing but ashes. Family heirlooms had been stolen, houses destroyed, livestock slaughtered. You collected what remained of the people you knew and tried to move on.

But the ground did not move on, it did not forget. The dirt drank their blood like water. Citizens from Castletown and beyond vied to sow the fecund soil fertilized by the corpses of your people (even now, every week or so a farmer will till his land only to find a human bone, a half-burnt shoe, or a piece of jewelry bearing the crest of a Sheikah family long extinct).

You knelt in that soil and told me you had opened the gates of the village because you saw no reason not to. Any secrets the Sheikah wished to keep from the outside world had already been stolen from them, or taken to the grave. If you were to serve the royal family, you were to serve its people. You let them in, let them build their houses, let them construct their windmill and till the ground, let them destroy what was left of the ancient village you once knew.

I looked at the graves of your friends and neighbors, at the callousness of my own culture, the weakness of my own heart, and started to cry. You did not stop me. You just made your rounds of the graveyard, paying your respects to each headstone, weaving a sign with your hands, signaling to the dead that they were not forgotten.

When you took me back through the village and past the guards, back into bed, you sang to me as I closed my eyes, but I did not sleep. I pressed up against you but stayed awake, until the sun rose above Death Mountain's peak, as it always had. It was a different sun than we had watched from our spot on the eastern side of the palace. It was red with blood, slow and sinister, heavy with stains I could never wash from it. I have long since stopped trying.

Now, when I visit Kakariko, the graveyard is the first place I go. Sometimes, when I wander along the length of unmarked headstones, I find a memento of your people. I will reach down into the dirt and unearth a pendant, a scrap of metal, an arrowhead. I hide these treasures in my bedchamber. My collection grows, but no matter how many scraps of your past I can scrounge from the blood-soaked soil of Kakariko, it cannot bring me any closer to you.

* * *

It was early morning, long before sunrise, when you woke me with a hand over my mouth. My mind still burdened with sleep, I thought we were going to watch the sun climb over Death Mountain, so I followed you eagerly, yawning and wiping my eyes. But you didn't lead me to our usual spot on the eastern tower. You did not take me down any other familiar halls, you did not escort me to any of our favorite places.

It didn't take me long before I realized that the chaos of my dreams had flooded the waking world. At first I was certain I was still asleep, that this was a continuation of my nightmare, that this was merely a part of my dream I had not yet slept through.

I was right, in a way. It was my nightmare. But it was no longer merely the fevered imaginings of a restless princess. It was a fulfilled premonition, a fearful picture of the future that had flowed through the river of time and flooded the present.

(Let me speak, for a brief moment, of the ironic inadequacy of prophecy. If all premonitions come true, they are useless to us, for there is nothing we can learn from them that might save us from a future we are fated to meet. If they are visions of coming times that can be altered or avoided, they are but one possibility in an endless sea of potential. This is no different from not knowing the future at all, for anyone can imagine a scenario we must work toward or avoid.

Prophecies are only proven prophecies after the fact. Before then, they are unsupported hypotheses. No different from wild guesses. After fulfillment, they are worthless.)

The distant clangs of metal on metal awoke me fully. I followed you down to the stables, where a horse, saddled and ready, waited for us. The smell of black magic permeated the air, and I knew instantly to whom it belonged. The man I had fervently troubled my father about, the evil-eyed, cloud-shrouded man from my dreams—his hand was recognizable in every aspect of the chaos.

As we rode through the castle grounds and out into the city, you tried to avoid the worst of the carnage. There was no use hiding the bloodshed from me; whatever route we could take to safety led through the thick of battle. From the back of our mount, I watched many soldiers fall—some I had known since childhood, some were recently recruited, budding swordsman, barely older than I.

I remember, as I watched one helmeted boy fall under the scimitar of his enemy, I fervently wished the child from the forest was not among the swordsmen caught up in the battle. I knew he should save his courage, and his life, for another, better time. I did not catch a glimpse of him as we rode from the castle and through the town, but that did not stop me from worrying. He could've been among any of the soldiers who had fallen during the siege—he could've been in the crowd of citizens the King of Thieves cut down as they fled.

It was with a terrible, overwhelming relief that I saw him by the drawbridge, eyes wide with bewilderment and fear. As we burst from the black smoke, from the screaming maelstrom of the city, I cursed you for not stopping to help him, for urging our horse into an ever faster gallop. I understand your callousness is what saved me, but at the same time, I resolved never to be so cold, never to ignore a cry for help or a desperate look.

I've paid for that resolution many times over, I assure you, but I have not learned my lesson. And I'm sure I never will.

* * *

The first days in the wilderness were by far the worst. I knew the fate of my home, my nurses, and my father—I had seen it a hundred times a hundred different nights as I closed my eyes. But knowledge of their demise did not help me when the clouds gathered over the castle, it did not help when the hordes of civilians fled the town, it did not help when the city—my city, under my protection—crumbled into ruin. It was not a slow transformation. And neither was mine.

It did not take me long to rip off my old dress, to adorn the garments of the impoverished, the secretive. I wore shadow like a cloak and wrapped myself in sacred music, relying on no teacher but you, reveling in no warmth but our weak fires and your protective embrace.

It did not take me long to crawl out of my role as deposed monarch and slip into the skin of your apprentice, a secret-keeper of your clan. You taught me the nature of shadow, you taught me the ancient arts of your ancestors.

I saw your smile when you looked at me, when I grew strong and fast and adept. I saw the love and pride in you even when I failed, even when I disappointed you. Even when I fell, when my feet slipped out from under me or when the strings of my lyre failed to resound, I saw it.

I was your only disciple. But for the first time since the war, for the first time since the genocide that had destroyed your people, your way of life, you were not entirely alone. There was one last Sheikah with you.

* * *

You had always said that people did not have enough reverence toward death. That it was in our nature to fear it, despite its inevitability. But I thought of the death visited upon the people of my forsaken kingdom and I feared for them. I feared and I detested the decay that had been brought upon them through my neglect.

"If it is not death we fear, if it is not death itself we despise and fight against, what is it?" I asked. This was in the early years of my training, when the parts of who I was as a child still threatened to hold me back.

You took no offense at my foolish question. When the man who stole my kingdom from me claimed himself a king of darkness, you took offense at that. You scoffed at his flippancy, at his insolence toward death itself.

"It is not the darkness, or even death, that we fight against, for there is nothing to fear from either. It is cruelty. It is the untimeliness and inhumanity with which death visits upon this land."

At first I did not understand your answer. But over the years I realized there is subtlety in darkness, there is nuance in death. Shadow has a morbid delicacy that few ever notice, much less appreciate.

There is too little respect given to the darkness. The priests of the goddesses speak only of salvation, only of the goodness of light and the evil of shadow. They had instilled in me, and the rest of their flock, the surety of light's intrinsic virtue, but I have since discarded this simplistic, misinformed dichotomy.

It is too easy for people to fear what they do not know, and loathe what they fear. It was the darkness of my dreams that terrified me, the light that comforted me, but as I grew older in your arms, and I cast aside childish things, I learned the quietness of shadow, the presumption of light of its own inherent rightness.

I know better. I am a creature of light, and I am rarely right. I am rarely honorable, I am no regent, no role model, no sage.

The people of Hyrule have long given the light far too much devotion. It is this neglect of the other elements that has weakened our connection to the Sacred Realm. It is this partiality that has made the other temples vulnerable, that made them easy targets for the snake-hearted King of Thieves. It is this longing for comfort that made the royal historians erase Hyrule's bloody history of greed and hatred. It is this childish wish for light's supremacy that made us forget our mistakes, and refuse to learn from those we remembered. It is what drove us to ruin.

And I am sure it was what cursed Kakariko, when the well burst with angry spirits. It was that forgetfulness, that anger at being discarded, that wrested the formless ghosts from the haunted ground.

We were both disappointed at the feeble way I tried to stop it, throwing my physical and not spiritual self at it. That was, after all, what drove you to the depths of the Temple of Shadow—my failure, my injuries. You had to stop what I could not. There was no way I could've known that when you disappeared into the darkness of that spiritual place, you would not come out—at least, not as the woman I knew.

Fortunately our golden-haired friend was there, all innocent frown and good intentions. He helped me from the ground, tried his best to tend to me. Of course, I couldn't let him. I slipped away using the same techniques—even the same route—as we took when you escorted me to the graveyard for the first time.

I always regretted leaving him alone in his bewilderment, indefatigable and earnest. He never abandoned hope, never faltered. He always had a habit of entering and exiting my life only at crucial moments, just when I needed him.

I still wait for him. Evidently my crises of identity, the bouts of wrestling furiously with an uncertain future, do not cause me enough suffering for him to sense he must return to me. He is the only man I would've tolerated as a companion, the only person I would've accepted in your place, and he is as absent as you.

Perhaps he knows I am not worthy of him. I am not worthy of either of you. I have built bridges, opened trade routes, rebuilt a peaceful and prosperous kingdom, and I do nothing but fight with myself about trivialities. You have told me countless times to doubt myself less, to trust my instincts—and I try, I truly do, but every beat of my heart, every incomprehensible wandering of my mind, leads me back to you.

I wonder, when I allow my thoughts to drift into inexcusable flights of fancy, if he is looking for you. He has done everything I've asked of him, and much I have not—if he is indeed as dedicated a servant to the crown as many claim, he may already have you by the hand. He may be dragging you from your stars, from your Sacred Realm, from the formless reaches of death itself, back to me.

There is nothing more I'd ask from any hero.

* * *

I was always so intrigued by your shadowy hand, by your dark thaumaturgy. You taught me the meaning of shadow, you taught me the beauty of death-magic—you brought me near death more than once, toying with my heart as you did. I died in your arms more times than I can count; you killed me with your words and your lips, your kind hands and strong arms. They were small deaths, deaths I would gladly die again, so long as you were there to guide me through my own darkness.

"You will do what is expected of you," you told me. I had been crying in your arms for what I later learned would be the last time. "You will marry a man of noble blood, and have many children, rule with a wise, stern hand." You drew me closer to you, and I couldn't keep parts of myself from falling off me like leaves on an autumn tree. When you lifted my face to yours and brushed my forehead with your lips, I crumbled to dust in your arms. "But always remember, when the shadows fall, when the people close their eyes, when they give you even a second alone, I will be there for you. Always."

I knew you were deft in the arts of deception, but I never took you for an outright liar.

* * *

Sometimes, even still, when the nights are calm and I'm alone, I clothe myself in magic and make my way out my chamber window, onto the castle roof. Sometimes I take my harp with me, and let the sounds of the strings carry me across the countryside, let the music fly me across the cold, calm glass of Lake Hylia, into the smoke and steam of Death Mountain's red throat, through the greenly quivers of endless, hidden trees. I will stand for hours atop the desert colossus, the birthplace of spirits, and I will walk the familiar shadows and graveyards of Kakariko, where they meet their inevitable end. The infinite rain, the wandering souls and tortured wails of the damned do not bother me, for I can look into the face of death itself and see you—oh goddesses, I can almost see your face in the darkness.

I sit at the altar of shadow and listen to the echoes of drums, deep in the underworld, marching souls to their final rest, and I know you conduct those drums, your wide, brown hands so graceful in the violet gloom. I will see you at the forefront of the procession, spirits and souls and sages at your side, dancing toward eternity.

I should be with you. By all rights, I should be with you. Am I not a sage myself, have I not earned the right to march beside you on that ineffable bridge of magic that straddles the worlds of life and death, that arcs over the Sacred Realm? Your heart's answer, and mine, is yes. But we both know I am not done here.

I long for nothing more than to shirk the obligations of royalty and instead take up the mantle of Sheik—is it not sad, do you think, that I find satisfaction in impersonating the last survivor an ancient race, a leftover of genocide? Compared to fulfilling the role of your final disciple, queenship is a tiresome, dreary task.

I would give up the feasts, the soft, large beds, the hot baths and leisure; I'd eschew dresses and jewelry and fragrant oils, comfortable shoes and a fireplace with which to warm myself; I would gladly burn my castle, uproot my gardens and abdicate my throne to live again in the wilderness, starving, cold, suffering, purposeful, with you. I was an inch from death every hour, and it made me feel as if I were living. I miss the balancing, the falling, the fighting, the aches and pains from fire and rocks against my skin, the lacerations, the broken bones, the feeling of you wrapping me in bandages as we lay in a silent glen. I miss your healing hands, the way you would cup my cheek so gently, before laying your lips on my forehead, or over my eyes. I miss the taste of you, the smokiness of a fire, the faint smell of whatever you had killed for our dinner—you were nothing less than a sensorial sonnet. Your eyes held every constellation I knew, every possible light that could ever banish the abyss that threatened to devour my land.

I see you in the sky sometimes. I look up into the endless night, and spy a streak of violet thaumaturgy, like a lost star wandering. I know you are not wandering. You have purpose, you have things to do, as do I—but promise me, when this is all over, and I lay myself down for the final time, my noble sons and daughters gathered around me, when they put white tulips on my grave, promise me you will come back for me.

I do not want to ascend to that light which embraces the virtuous dead. I want to follow you, down, down into the deepest dark, where those drums beat out agony in the black haze. Promise me, when you finish your sagely tasks and return to the mundane world, take me by the hand and drag me down into the shadows, let my only warmth be your body, let my only light be you.

Please, it's all I ask.


End file.
